1. Field of Art
The disclosure relates to the field of electronic games operating on a host device, and more particularly to the communication between a host device and a peripheral device while a user interacts with an electronic game.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern smartphones, tablet computers, and other mobile devices have a rapidly increasing amount of processing power, graphics capabilities, connectivity options, storage, and memory. As a result, mobile devices are becoming a preferable platform for electronic games. However, mobile devices have many limitations. For example, games on mobile devices are difficult, and even impractical, to experience with multiple users participating using the same screen as an interface. In addition, the touchscreens that are included in most mobile devices as the primary input device are poorly suited for interacting with many types of games and cannot be used to implement complex control schemes.
Some wireless technology standards offer multiple communication profiles that can be used for communication between devices, such as between a smartphone and a controller. For example, the Bluetooth® wireless standard includes profiles such as the Human Input Device Profile (HID) and the Serial Port Profile (SPP).
Mobile operating systems are generally configured to support a limited set of communication profiles. In particular, the operating systems of typical mobile computing devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, typically connect to input devices via a unidirectional profile (e.g., HID) that only allows data to be sent from the input device to the computing device. However, unidirectional profiles cannot be used to send data back to the input device. This is particularly disadvantageous when connecting a game controller to the computing device because game controllers typically include features (e.g., indicator LEDs or motors for force feedback) that are controlled by signals received from a host device.